Content management systems are employed in a wide variety of industries to manage content in the form of records. Records may include, among other things, electronic documents, files, meta-data, employee or customer databases entries, and so forth. Capturing, managing, accessing, validating, archiving, and disposing of the information held in documents and records is a complex matter and a key challenge for organizations. Regulation, compliance, and legal requirements only add to the complexity. Archiving of some information is prescribed by law, such as the Data Protection, Freedom of Information Acts, Sarbanes-Oxley, and so forth. Electronic evidence is now readily acceptable by the courts, which require proof of the source and absence of tampering. Authentication or validation processes are essential. Accordingly, organizations may utilize a content management system.
Typically, content management systems are designed to support a large number of simultaneous users. In many conventional content management systems, users download or “check out” records from a persistent storage medium such as a hard drive or bank of hard drives. When changes are made to a particular record by one user (often via an application), the changes are copied back to the persistent storage medium at some point. While this copying is taking place, the user's interface to the content management system may freeze or suffer from relatively serious lag. As content management systems have become more complex and record sizes larger, the delays caused by these freezes have become longer such that, in some circumstances, users become frustrated by the delays and prematurely exit the content management system.